A while back we wrote about Stalking Big Game on Digg. We pointed out that the PMS Social Suite had an easy way to load the Top 100 and Top 1000 Diggers. Friending them consists of just selecting them in the Find Friends grid and clicking Go To Page. The application will automatically open a tab with each user's profile for you. Just click on the tab and click Add Friend and you're their friend.

That's one way to approach things, and it should certainly be part of your strategy. If you're working in a marketing group, at least one of you should have as a task drawing the Top 100 as your friends. But it's tough work. Think of how many friend requests someone in the Top 100 gets everyday. Getting the attention of a Top 100 Digger is a tall order.

Smaller is Easier

Stalking smaller game is quite a bit easier, but they're tougher to spot. You can't just drop by SocialBlade and download the list. But the benefits of active diggers that aren't in the top 1000 are significant:

• You Can Get Their Attention - You're looking for other diggers that are also playing the game. They're actively looking for friends to support and get support in return. If you friend them and start digging their submissions, most of the time they'll respond with making the relationship mutual in short order.
• They Work Harder - Remember the old Avis commercials? Someone who is trying to build an account will be more diligent in helping you than a Top 100 Digger, who may have the attitude that you need them more than they need you.
• Early Relationships Are Stronger - Given the turmoil on Digg, the people that are at the top today most likely will not be at the top next year. Becoming an early friend of the up-and-coming stars could pay very handsomely.

So What Are We Looking For?

Spotting a future star can be fairly difficult. If you're doing it manually, you'll be spending a lot of time pouring through profile pages trying to get a feel for how hard people are working to join the club of Top Diggers. Here are some characteristics of people that will make great friends:

• They Blind Digg - While blind digging may be hated by the community, the simple fact is that most of the Top 1000 Diggers blind digg. We define a blind digger as someone that will digg your stories without spending too much time looking at them. As MrBabyMan said in his podcast, he supports his friends by digging their submissions and he trusts that they're submitting great content because he has carefully vetted them. Set aside the logic of that statement and consider that someone that is blind digging makes a good target to become one of your friends. How do you find a blind digger? One way to look for them is to look at the number of diggs they're doing in a day. Someone that diggs 500 stories a day most likely is not carefully reading and considering every story. You can also look at the times of someone's diggs. If they digg a burst of 3-4 stories a minute they're probably not reading them.
• They Mostly Digg Their Friends Submissions - The metric you're looking for is what percentage of their friends submissions do they vote for? It's not a measure of how many of their diggs are for their friends, because most likely they'll also vote a lot of random stories that hit the front page. But if you can spot a trend that someone is digging most of the stories that are submitted by their friends, then you can reasonably conclude that they're also playing the game.
• They Have Link Juice in Their Profile - Yes, Google Toolbar Pagerank is mostly useless as a measure, but one thing it can be good for is spotting a page that Google thinks is important. If a Digg profile is greater than PR 0, then you've spotted someone that's doing something right. Having them vote for your stories is a good thing -- it flows link juice to your submission and thus to the final resting place in your url.
• Their Profile Was Recently Created - I've seen a lot of advice from experts that claims you should only friend someone that has been around for a long time. Actually, the converse can be true. If you spot a profile that is only a few months old and is actively playing the game then you may be on to a winner. It could very well be someone very famous that was banned, knows exactly how to play the game, and is on their way back up.
• They are Active - If they're not churning around 100 Diggs/Day for the last 30 days then they're probably not worth your time. The people that are going at it really hard and recently are who you're looking for.
• They've Posted Contact Information - If their profile doesn't have an image and there's no way to contact them off site such as AIM or an email, then they don't really know how to play the game. If you can AIM them, then you can contact them and build a relationship without Big Brother Kevin watching what you're doing. Furthermore, someone that puts their AIM in their Digg profile understands the game. Most people's reaction is to not put up an address that could be spammed. But people that are really working at Digg understand that you need people to be able to contact you offsite.
• They Don't Shout - If they don't have shouts turned off from public view then they're not a player. If they're shouting 10 stories a day then they haven't figured out that shouts actually hurt your submissions. A public shout list with a ton of shouts is a good indicator that they're not what you're looking for.

If you're trying to do all that manually, then good luck. You can spend a lot of time analyzing a profile to determine blind digging rates and friend support. Or you can use the PMS Social Suite, which puts all of those statistics right at your fingertips. We even provide a customized list of Interesting Diggers on your dashboard that show potential friends that meet the criteria for they kind of friends you should be looking for.

It's really just a matter of how much your time is worth. If the tool saves you 2 hours/day for 20 days a month, then your time has to be worth less than $1/hour for it to make sense for you to work without a tool. Go buy Wickedly Evil Social Marketing Tactics and you'll get 3 months worth of the software for free. The book costs less than a quarterly subscription. How can you lose?